1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of networking. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus that facilitates syntax-directed application layer data buffering.
2. Related Art
Existing transaction-based applications, such as web servers and application servers, typically presume that clients operate with moderate-to-high bandwidth, and low-to-moderate latency. However, resource-constrained computing devices, such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), are likely to provide both high latency and low bandwidth. This causes applications to get “pinned” waiting for data (e.g., a packet or a set of packets) to be received before the application can processes the incoming data. In addition to “application pinning,” the resources associated with the application may also be pinned, thereby tying up valuable resources that could be used to process requests from other devices.
Because these transaction-based applications spend a lot of time waiting for data from high-latency and/or low-bandwidth devices, they typically can only serve a fraction of the devices they could handle if the inbound traffic was received efficiently.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for handling incoming requests from computing devices without the problems listed above.